Pretty Vacant

Below you will find a photo of Pretty Vacant, a new installation by Rietveld Landscape, acquired by the Centraal Museum with support of the Mondriaan Fund.

Pretty Vacant

The installation Pretty Vacant by design and research studio Rietveld Landscape encourages visitors to take a fresh look at the empty spaces of the Centraal Museum. The blue window literally and figuratively sheds a new light on the space and complements the architecture of this medieval chapel. The window is based on the ‘negative spaces’ of Rietveld Landscape’s earlier installation Vacant NL, which was the Dutch submission for the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2010.

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The installation in the Gerrit Rietveld-designed pavilion in Venice showed the enormous potential of 10,000 disused public buildings in the Netherlands from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries.

From the press release of the Centraal Museum: “Rietveld Landscape’s work fits in well with the Centraal Museum aim to acquire work at the intersection of art, design and architecture. Rietveld Landscape is a young studio that represents in an outstanding way the new developments at this intersection. Museum Director Edwin Jacobs described them as ‘the talents in field of spatial interventions, without equivalent in any existing architectural or theoretical discourse. They are real new-thinkers in images.’ Through the acquisition of the installation Pretty Vacant by Rietveld Landscape with support from the Mondriaan Fund, the Centraal Museum has realised its ambition of adding Vacant NL to the ‘Collectie Nederland’.”

News Items: New Radicals

Last year in the UK, the Observer and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts joined forces to find 50 New Radicals. They selected “people who were coming up with creative answers to the big issues of our times”, according to newspaper the Guardian.

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Yesterday this initiative got a follow-up in the Netherlands. My brother, Ronald, and I were selected by a jury chaired by Herman Wijffels as New Radicals because of our innovative interdisciplinary approach to architectural design, which also integrates insights from my work in the philosophy of enactive or embodied cognition. Just like the report of the Rotterdam Design Prize jury last year, this confirms the potential of translational embodied cognition and, more in particular, of the field of enactive architecture.

For more information see news item at Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO)-website, here.

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